Chapter Six

 

Joshua

It’s been six days. I’m woozy from lack of sleep, and from the effort of maintaining my focus, a task that was once as effortless as breathing.

I’ve relocated to California, to a very expensive and isolated rental home in Mendocino County. I’m expecting some guests, and while I wait, I’m searching through property records. Ruiz is here too. He’s taken a leave of absence from work and is staying half an hour away at a hotel I’m paying for.

It’s just as well that he’s not staying with me. Ruiz wouldn’t approve of my guests.

I desperately hope I’m in the right place. Ruiz managed to identify Charlemagne’s rental car, the one he drove out of the parking garage in Boston after he ditched his van. He gave me the information, and I hacked into traffic cameras and traced the car to a private airport in upstate New York.

Garrett kidnapped the owner of the airport and brought him to me, and I cut pieces off him until he told me where the airplane went. Northern California, where the Blackthorne Institute is located. Where Dr. Barnard and his family live. Apparently Charlemagne has been flying back and forth between Northern California and New York every week for the last six months.

Finding this out took time. Two days. Time I don’t have.

Every morning I get videos from Charlemagne. He’s killing her bit by bit. Killing her spirit, her hope, her soul.

This morning I got one that showed him cutting his initials into the bruised flesh of her chest with a box cutter. He’s using the initials MS—apparently he’s taken on the new name Micah Smith. That’s what he announced when he started cutting. “Property of Micah Smith,” he said from behind that mask. Tears leaked from her eyes and ran down her cheeks, and she sobbed, making horrible, hopeless noises. She’s as white as a ghost, with dark circles under her eyes.

He’s sent me videos of himself branding his initials into her left butt cheek. Raping her anally. Whipping her until she passes out.

Thanks to a lifetime’s worth of brutal self-denial of my feelings, I don’t even break a sweat as I watch. My heartbeat actually drops a little. An observer who didn’t know better would think I was watching a corporate training video. But there’s a part of me that’s an enraged, screaming animal, torn away from its mate. I am still walling that part of me away for now, but it’s coming at a cost. I can feel it. I spent an entire lifetime of moving through life fueled only by anger and revenge and lust. Now I realize that many other emotions were living inside me the whole time, raging and hurling themselves against the prison bars of my mind.

Sorrow. Terrible grief at the loss of my mother and my brothers, at the loss of the childhood we never had.

Burning, corroding hatred of my father.

Tamara’s kidnapping broke some kind of dam inside me. All those emotions are bubbling up like hot lava. It is taking more and more mental effort to keep them suppressed, and soon there will be a reckoning. An explosion that will tear me apart.

But to save Tamara, I need to keep those emotions locked away, because I must think with a clear head. Panic and rage are not useful to me; those emotions cloud the senses and muddy the thinking. Until she’s safe, the bad feelings and dangerous thoughts will stay right where they need to, festering in a toxic sludge that’s eroding my sanity.

My heartbeat is speeding up.

No.

I need to focus.

As I sit in my office, working the computer, I remind myself of the control I still have.

I am confident that Charlemagne doesn’t know I’m here, which is helpful. I accessed the location tracker on the cell phone he gave me, and I rewrote the software so the phone would still report that I was in New York.

And I have figured out how he fooled the surveillance team I paid to watch Dr. Barnard and his family. Ever since the day I had my brother trapped at the Blackthorne Institute, I had them under guard. I needed Dr. Barnard to know that if he ever let Charlemagne escape, his family would pay the price.

But somehow, Charlemagne’s been free for six months, and Dr. Barnard never said a word to me. Even worse, he lied to me and showed me fake video making it look as if Charlemagne was still locked up.

Looking over the surveillance video of the Barnard family, I have a good idea of why he did that.

Charlemagne was holding different members of Dr. Barnard’s family prisoner. That’s how he got Dr. Barnard to cooperate, to maintain the ruse that he was still safely tucked away at the Blackthorne Institute.

Dr. Barnard would go out for a walk with his wife and a couple of his kids. A week later, he’d be seen taking three of his kids out to dinner, but this time, the wife and other two kids weren’t there. The entire family hasn’t been seen together at one time in six months.

And close-ups of the videos show the strained looks on their faces, the tightness of their smiles. I should have noticed that a lot sooner. If I were better at understanding and interpreting human emotions, I would have.

If Charlemagne has been holding members of the family prisoner, that means they know where he’s staying. Early this morning, I had my men stage a raid on Dr. Barnard’s house, and they snatched up Dr. Barnard and the two boys who are currently with him.

It’s midmorning when Dr. Barnard and his two sons, Fletcher and Paul, arrive. Fletcher is twelve and Paul is ten. The whole family is blond with pale blue eyes and fair complexions. They’re all pale from strain, and there’s a haunted look in their eyes, but Dr. Barnard is the only one who’s been crying. His cheeks are still wet with tears and his lean face is puckered with self-pity. His sons just look angry and resolute. They’re more man than he is, and their voices haven’t even changed yet.

Fletcher looks at me suspiciously. “You’re not Micah,” he says to me. “You look like him, but you walk differently.”

Smart boys.

“I’m his twin brother. My name is Joshua. Nothing’s going to happen to you. I just need to talk to you.” I’ve never been the type to say reassuring things before. Tamara’s influence again.

I gesture at Garrett. “Take them down the hall and give them some video games while I talk to their father,” I say to him.

They glance at their father. He looks away, avoiding their eyes, and he wails as I lead him down the hall. He’s actually crying out loud in front of his children. Jesus. What a pussy.

Once I get him into my sound-proofed workroom, I tie Dr. Barnard to a chair and I pull up my cart of tools. I pick up a skinning knife. I don’t have time to screw around.

He starts crying louder, like a big miserable infant.

“I wish I’d never met you,” he snivels. “Do you know what your brother did to me?”

“No, but I hope it hurt. Now you’re going to start talking.”

He tells me everything he knows. Charlemagne seduced one of the nurses and, with her help, escaped six months ago. Dr. Barnard was stupid enough to try to cover it up so I wouldn’t find out.

That was a mistake.

My brother kidnapped Dr. Barnard and took him to a big empty warehouse and cut his balls off to pay him back for keeping him prisoner. He interrogated Dr. Barnard and found out I was the one behind his continued imprisonment. He also showed Dr. Barnard’s the head of the nurse who helped him escape. Left it sitting on a table next to him while he tortured him.

Then he set him free, but only after kidnapping Dr. Barnard’s wife and two of his daughters. And ever since then, he’s swapped them out like pieces in a chess game. Sometimes he’d keep the daughters, sometimes the sons, sometimes the wife would get to stay with her kids, sometimes he’d send her back home and keep a few of her children. There are three girls and two boys.

If Dr. Barnard utters a word, they’ll be killed.

His wife and his daughters were snatched up a week ago, and his sons returned to him. He has no idea, of course, where they’re being held.

So here he is, a neutered, pathetic, sniveling shell of his former self. His life unraveled by greed and stupidity.

But what he’s telling me is the biggest break I’ve gotten so far.

For this to work, Charlemagne would have to be staying in a house that’s reasonably close to Dr. Barnard’s family. My search area just shrunk considerably.

I hurry to the room where Fletcher and Paul are waiting. They’re sitting on a couch, huddled close together. Garrett gave them Nintendo Switches, but they’re just ignoring them, talking to each other in low voices.

“Are you friends with your brother?” Fletcher blurts out when I walk over to them.

“No, I’m not. He wants to kill me, but I’m going to kill him first. And I brought you here so you can help me find him. Then you’ll be free.”

Long ago, I told Dr. Barnard that if he let my brother escape, I’d kill his family. He’d nodded and smiled and cashed my checks. I meant it then. But Tamara has worked her magic on me, and now I couldn’t do it. I won’t hurt these boys. They’ve already had enough of a rotten hand dealt to them, with a father like Dr. Barnard. He didn’t even say a word about his sons when I left him.

Paul glances at Fletcher for reassurance. Fletcher pats his brother on the shoulder. I’m strangely fascinated. My brothers and I never dared to offer each other comfort; our father would have seen it as a sign of weakness and punished us both until we bled.

“He has our mother and our sisters,” Fletcher says, clenching his fists. “Can you find them?”

“Yes, but only with your help. I need you to tell me everything you can. Think about places he kept you. Did you go by car or in a plane? And was it always the same place?”

“It was always the same place,” Fletcher says. “He put us in the back of a van, and he tried to trick us by driving around and taking different routes. But I paid attention while we were driving, and I counted in my head to keep track of time. The shortest time it ever took was three hours, and the longest it took was five. But his house isn’t three hours from ours. Even the time he drove for three hours, he was driving back and forth for a while to make it seem like it was farther away than it really was.”

I nod approvingly. “Excellent! You guys are geniuses.” The words feel strange on my tongue. Kindness. Reassurance. I’m a new man, Tamara. Please survive so I can show you.

Fletcher smiles just a little, then the smile vanishes. “Sometimes we smelled this really foul manure smell, like from some kind of farm, and that was about half an hour before we got there. We didn’t smell it every time, though.”

Hope floods through me. “This is fantastic. You’re helping me narrow it down. Anything else you can tell me will be helpful. Did you get any sense of how big the house was inside? I can start searching property records.”

Fletcher frowns in concentration. “Not really. We’d drive into a garage, and the door would close behind us, and we’d have to wear hoods on our heads until we got to the part of the house where he kept us. We never saw the outside of the house, and the windows were all blocked off.”

“Oh! The bird.” Paul speaks up suddenly. He looks at his older brother, who shrugs, looking skeptical. “I heard it one time when we were pulling into the garage. It was a double ring-necked warbler that’s mostly found in Tehama County.” At Fletcher’s skeptical look, he tells him, “I know what I heard.”

Tehama County would make sense. It’s within the driving range we’re talking about, and it’s remote and rural. A perfect place for Micah’s needs.

“But that was one time. And different birds can sound like each other. If you’re wrong, if you send him to the wrong place…” Fletcher protests.

“I know what I heard. I know birds.” Paul looks at me. “I’m going to be a wildlife biologist,” he says with pride. Then his face falls. “If you don’t murder us.”

Something twists inside me. I remember waking up every morning as a child, wondering if this would be the day my father would kill me. I grew numb to it in the end.

“I am nothing like my brother. That’s why he’s my enemy. Nobody is going to kill you, because I will keep you safe,” I say fiercely. “I’m going to find your mother and your sisters, and it’s going to be because of what you just told me, and I’m going to make sure you stay safe and protected. I swear to you. Your days of living in fear are over.”

Who is saying these words? Superhero Joshua?

And I actually mean those words. I wish Tamara could see me now.

I see both boys visibly relax, and Fletcher puts his arm around his brother’s shoulder. They exchange glances, and I see the hope in their eyes.

“He’s telling the truth,” Fletcher says to Paul. “He’s not like his brother.”

“You’ve given me some good tips,” I say. “Let me get to work.”

Now that I’ve taken them, the clock is ticking down. I’ve got to make my move. I call Ruiz and tell him what I’ve just learned. Then I return to my computer to search property records again with a renewed sense of hope.